Finally, an Obama speech worth hearing.

It’s a first for me. Normally, I find his gifts as an orator to be vastly overrated. Do I have examples? Yes I do.

But this speech in Orlando, Florida at lunch time made me laugh in the aisle of my local grocery store. His voice cracks in several places in disbelief. Like, “you can’t make this up, Trump actually said this out loud”.

Anyway, normally, Obama grates on me. The way he blew off the working class is partially why we’re in this mess today. But he’s not an antisocial malicious dictator wannabe who will wreck the place on his way out.

Enjoy.

PSA: Last Day in PA

If you still have your mail in ballot and you haven’t mailed it in yet, don’t.

You’ve probably run out of time to get it in by 11/3 due to the sabotage of the USPS.

That doesn’t mean you can’t get your vote counted but if you want your mail in ballot to count, your best bet is to take it to your board of elections today. That’s right, hand deliver it. Today is the last day to request a ballot and I think you may not have another early voting opportunity after 10/27. Hurry hurry.

If you haven’t received your mail in ballot yet, contact your Board of Elections now. If it shows up between now and Election Day, take it with you to your polling place and hand it over to the poll worker. Your ballot will be destroyed and you can vote on a machine.

If it never comes, go to your polling place, report it missing, if you haven’t already called your Board of Elections, and vote by provisional ballot.

In other words, if you haven’t mailed it in, it’s not the end of the world. You can still vote. But have a Plan B.

And if you must vote in person, wear your mask, bring your pocket sized Lysol spray and disinfectant wipes, and keep your head down.

There may be Poll watchers but I’m betting that both sides will be represented.

And now a message from Ruth.

Here's the deal, you can try to distort the system. You can attempt to kill as many of us as you possibly can. But it won't matter, we're taking you down at the polls, no matter how hard you try to rig the election.

For Ruth, we rise.https://t.co/4IUi2hMJ41

— Pattern Integrity Films (@pttrn_ntgrty) October 27, 2020

Despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt.

We do not.

Climbing the water tower to defend Wolf, Fetterman, Shapiro, Peduto and Levine

Yesterday, Trump menaced my governor, Tom Wolf. Weirdly, Trump said he’d been watching Tom Wolf in Philadelphia. Cue Sting and the Police at about the 3:50 minute mark:

Would someone please tell Donald that our state capital is Harrisburg, not Philadelphia?

What the heck could Trump be watching in Philly anyway? That thing the Eagles call football?? All I’ve seen lately from Philly is souls to the polls videos with people in line dancing to the Cha-Cha Stomp.

Anyway, I think our governor has handled the pandemic extraordinarily well. Unlike Cuomo and Whitmer, Wolf has kept a relatively low profile. There was a lockdown but Wolf threaded the needle very delicately. Many of the most rural counties in PA opened as quickly as possible without a significant number of cases. They opened way before the cities here.

Here in Pittsburgh, Mayor Peduto opened up the bars and restaurants in June and then after two weeks of pleading with people to wear masks and socially distance, he closed them again. Grounding us sucked but we flattened the curve after our spike in July. At one point in August we were down to 0 cases in Allegheny county. We’re now up to about 90 cases/day, which sounds like a lot until you consider how big Pittsburgh is. We had 72 cases in Allegheny county yesterday. That’s as many as more sparsely populated but deep deep red York county had yesterday.

Controlling this pandemic *can* be done. It’s been the same kind of disease prevention tactics we’ve been using for millennia.

But that hasn’t stopped the red counties in PA from getting all defiant and taking off their masks. Westmoreland county, just East of us, is seeing a pretty big spike. Trump country. Yeah, baby.

So, Trump came to PA yesterday and menaced my governor and his administration including AG Josh Shapiro, who is fighting the Trump campaign lawsuits in the courts. By extension, he’s insulted Rachel Levine, our excellent transgender health commissioner and Lt Governor John Fetterman who’s been whipping the vote.

Trump is having rallies in Martinsburg and Lititz, two teeming metropolises whose populations combined wouldn’t fill up a football stadium. He’s got to be bussing people in and emptying entire counties in order to get a few thousand people to his infect-a-thons. He’s pissed that Wolf has been restricting his rally venues.

And he’s been menacing Philly.

His voters are going to be going to the polls on 11/3. That should be interesting. By then, the accumulated effect of all those superspreader events in PA should mean that there will be a lot more infected people squeezing into the basements of the local Methodist churches, maskless no doubt, breathing all over the hapless poll workers, while the rest of us mail in ballot voters are in the safety of our homes, waiting for Donald to be soundly defeated.

Then we take to the street to Cha-Cha stomp him out of our lives for good.

****************

Hey, mail in voters in PA, if you just received your ballot, you can still deliver it personally to your board of elections. Do it ASAP. The mail carriers might be overwhelmed this week.

If you don’t need to make the lines any longer on Election Day, don’t.

Got your ballot? USE IT.

Drop it off.

That simple.

— John Fetterman (@JohnFetterman) October 27, 2020